Composer Jeffrey Mumford Awarded Second National Symphony Orchestra Commission By Rebecca Ringle ’03
	RELATED STORIES: -Cleveland Chamber Symphony Premieres Jeffrey Mumford's "a still radiance within dark air" -Works by Two Oberlin Composers Featured in Cleveland Composers Guild Concert -Conservatory Graduate To Perform at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.		Assistant Professor of Composition Jeffrey Mumford has received a commission – his second -- from the National Symphony Orchestra [NSO] for its 2003 season. The NSO will perform Mumford’s amid the light of quickening memory in a three-concert series, June 5 through 7, 2003, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Amid the light of quickening memory, a concerto for violin and harp, elaborates and expands upon material from Mumford’s first commission in 1995 for the NSO. Within a cloudburst of echoing brightness, a fanfare, had its premiere in honor of Leonard Slatkin’s advent as the orchestra’s music director. Mumford situates the music for his newest NSO commission in his home territory. "I grew up in Washington, and this piece follows a current trend in my music -- the reclamation of childhood," says Mumford. "It’s a chance for me to express musically different memories that I’ve lived in the city." The NSO commission also showcases Mumford’s music for an audience composed of some of his most enthusiastic admirers. In 1998, The Washington Post featured Mumford, along with Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter, Philip Glass and John Cage, in a series of profiles on American composers, asserting that each composer "stand[s] for representative movements in an exciting century for American music." Where critics dispatch words such as "evocative," "radiant," and "shimmering" to describe Mumford’s music, Mumford titles his pieces with vivid descriptions, often visual in orientation. Mumford says of his new work: "It draws partly on memories of the incredible cloudscapes I’d see out my window in that Chesapeake Bay climate." Mumford attributes his tendency toward the visual to his beginnings as a painter, when he was interested in the Dutch Baroque landscape school. "I would copy older paintings to understand the technique. However, during my time as an art major at the University of California, conceptual art was taking hold and the practice of imitation was much more accepted in the music department than the art department. I found myself, more and more, in the music building, and music became my outlet, but my fascination with cloudscapes remained with me." The premiere of amid the light of quickening memory will occur in the midst of busy seasons for performers of Mumford’s music throughout the country, several of whom are Oberlin students and alumni. On April 21, 2002, in Milwaukee at Wisconsin Lutheran College’s Schwann Recital Hall, violist Wendy Richman ’01 will present Mumford’s wending, a piece she premiered at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. last September. In fall 2002, Columbia University’s Miller Theater will present a Manhattan concert of Mumford’s music as part of its Portrait Series, profiling American composers. The concert will include the premiere of a landscape of interior resonances, a solo piano work commissioned by the series. In California in 2003, the Empyrean Ensemble will perform a Mumford quintet for flute, violin, viola, violoncello and piano. Mumford is also composing a piano quintet to be premiered in 2004 by pianist Amy Dissanayake and the Pacifica Quartet (with violinist Simin Ganatra '96). And over the next few years, violist Wendy Richman ’01 and saxophonist David Reminick ’02 will perform specially commissioned works by Mumford in recital.
			Back to the Backstage Pass